Some Things in This World by Joyce Thomas
Historically, elegies to nature aren’t hard to come by in poetry collections, but very few achieve the prismatic symphony—the swell of image, concept, and perfectly proportioned reference—as Thomas’ does. Notes of a restrained, though well-loved and looked-after, romanticism crop up throughout the collection. The shocked delight of the lyrical is well-paced with other hardier, intellectual stoicism, serving to reinforce the treasure of Thomas’ softness when it does appear:
“the tarry darkness / of the future— / the future now / that is ours.”
The collection is erudite in its empathy; Thomas nurses an emotional congressing of ecological passion and scholarly affinity for her subjects: beast, terrain, topography, weather, and wildness. Blindingly so, in similar ways a bolt reaches earth—too fast for sound, only the deliverance of rudimentary impact. It’s the breaking down of matter into its most elemental, a sensorial reboot with the power to stop time, or in our case, speech.
This begs the question of Thomas’ inspiration, its genesis and lean quality of power: something of the omniscient mythic resides in these poems; dually, the assured voice of astute scientist plays an equally pivotal role. The reader learns things. A schooling of both craft and inquiry. The osmosis that takes form in these poems is fastened with knowledge that alarms, shares space with galvanizing magnanimity, witty inference, and barbed ecological treatises that stretch the filaments of nature writing into something ecclesiastical. Such as in “Storm Warnings” when Thomas tackles the national memory of our most recent and deadly hurricanes:
“One thinks of omens and Holsteins, / the Second Coming, Of rough beasts bawling / like drowning saxophones.”
We come away cleansed and weather-bitten by the sheer expository collision of language; her grasp on the miracle of cadence is remarkable.
Thomas’s collection shrewdly allows us glimpses at the titanium infrastructure of her poems, in the same way I’ve often imagined it feels to glimpse a vision or version of the divine: fast, unfathomable, with undeniable markings of the inspired. Her sophisticated grasp on the structure of language hard-fists elegance out of the commonplace.
“I imagine stillborns / soaring heavenward to God; / recall deft hands forming / faceless dogs, tigers, giraffes— / hear the plaints of latex / being twisted, see the bodies plumped / that too soon deflated.”
The language recipe of Some Things in This World holds holiness up to geological and natural thumbprints and announces them blood bound, while weighing the Penguin’s famous tuxedo and a beloved dog’s death in tandem with the inevitability of extinction. Thomas juggles an eviscerating eye for meter with equal generosity for the unbidden loveliness of off-kilter detail. Bloom of surprise on the page, and the sober delight of finding oneself enough lost, and exactly so, to give ourselves fully over to the guiding strength of her narrative hand.
The reader oftentimes finds themselves in the outlands of space and time and history: primordial starlight, the baked lands of prehistory and bone, as Thomas does in “La Brea Tar Pits”:
“until only the trunk remains, / periscope up / as if to grasp the last breath of air.”
Behold, the sole camel grazing in Vermont pasture like Biblical beast—placed there as prophet—a partly esoteric pastime for deeper introspection: foreign and local diverge, leaving the reader breathless and uneasy with withheld knowledge. “Like the Cheese, the Camel” positions Animal on the page as both warning and savior, leaves us intentionally alone with the creature; we’re being taught a lesson, and it’s cruelly just, in the vein of Mother Nature. In the poem, Thomas leaves us with a philosophical image to chew on:
“While in Vermont the lone camel / stands knee-deep in grass and flowers wild, / dew-glazed dome crowned by the sun / as if to remind that beauty / incongruous often is.”
The poem forces us into a bizarre solitude in the found spaces of pasture and misplaced creature. In one of the collection’s most memorable poems —partly due to the brilliance of its title (which contains and maintains resolute pathos, while blithely navigating a special absurdity, a certain sweetness and simplicity that further remarks on its subject matter)—Thomas addresses the Penguin and his funny attire and impending extinction and the crucial, killer element of young life lost to nature. An everyday occurrence, but something, the poem argues, that still deserves proper mourning.
“Think of Penguins” is everything I want in a poem, and only further highlights Thomas’ dexterity with language and form: “the tusked elephants / trumpeting apocalypse” and “Think of the pale zeroes of their eggs”.
I wonder about the reasoning behind the placement of her poem “Praise of Three-Legged Dogs”. It opens the collection, was obviously meant to set the tone and tweak our attention toward certain themes, particular essences of important truths which Thomas felt determined to conquer. Disability floods the page, pulls no punches when it comes to precise language around topics so easily bruisable to the human heart. The dog lives next to his loss and seems at peace with its phantom limb, has gained easy control over its life again through the remarkable, creaturely habit of adaption.
The poem curiously ends on a note of hunger: starvation made metaphysical. It isn’t the kibble the dog longs for but a furry, missing paw, a final fourth contender to his rapturous doggy mobility. I wonder what Thomas meant by the poem’s entrance. It holds the collection’s door ajar for us to step through, all the while, we have soft tears in our eyes. Humans, by instinct, fall to pieces at the sight of a hurt animal. We’re given a relatively happy ending in “In Praise” but the heartstrings she’s so suddenly pulled are loose, looped, now, in tangles, our emotions are neither our own or anyone else’s, we can now safely enter into the land of beasts and enchantment she’s architect to.